Nearly every night this week, air-defense batteries over Erbil have lit up the sky intercepting drones that no one will own. On 17 July alone, Kurdish counter-terrorism forces reported downing 16 explosive-laden drones over the Kurdistan Region's capital — the fourth such swarm in three days — while a separate strike hit an ammunition depot in Sulaimaniyah province and another wave targeted a camp belonging to the exiled Iranian-Kurdish opposition party Komala, killing at least eight of its members, according to the group. Four drones were shot down near the US consulate in Erbil the same evening. In the space of 48 hours, at least six distinct attacks landed across Iraqi Kurdistan.
International coverage has folded all of this into the broader US-Iran war as a single undifferentiated category: "Iran attacks Iraqi Kurdistan." That framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete in a way that obscures the story's real center of gravity. Because as Iraqi and Kurdish security analysts are now pointing out, in most of this week's incidents, nobody — not Iran, not any Iraqi militia, not any of the half-dozen armed factions with a plausible motive — has actually claimed responsibility. And crucially, no Iraqi authority, federal or regional, has stated who is behind it either.
That silence is the story mainstream coverage keeps skipping past.
What has happened in the last hours
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has openly claimed a distinct thread of this violence: strikes through late June and early July on camps belonging to exiled Iranian-Kurdish opposition parties — the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, PJAK and Komala — near Erbil and Sulaimaniyah. Tehran's logic here is transparent and consistent: these groups are armed Iranian-Kurdish dissidents Iran accuses of serving Israeli and American interests, and Iran has struck their camps intermittently since the war reignited on 28 February, killing dozens of fighters across multiple incidents, including at least eight to nine Komala members in the 17 July strike near Sulaimaniyah, according to the group's own spokesman, Idriss Kohlwazi, speaking to AFP.
But a second, distinct category of attacks — the swarms over Erbil itself, the strikes on the US consulate perimeter, and a persistent campaign against Kurdistan's oil and gas infrastructure — carries no claim of responsibility at all. According to reporting by Shafaq News, the drone waves hitting Erbil on 15 and 17 July were both timed within hours of Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi's first visit to the White House, a coincidence Kurdish security officials have noted but not explained publicly. A day earlier, on 17 July, a drone struck the Tawke oilfield operated by Norway's DNO in the Zakho area; Kurdistan security sources told local media the drone's likely origin was territory controlled by Iran-backed militias, though — again — no group claimed it.
The pattern beneath the pattern: an engineered ambiguity
This is where the story that deserves more scrutiny actually begins. The current wave is not the first time Kurdistan's oil sector has been hit by unclaimed drones. Iraqi Kurdistan's energy infrastructure — the Khor Mor gas field, the Sarsang and Tawke oilfields, facilities run by DNO, Hunt Oil and HKN Energy — has been struck by unclaimed drone attacks repeatedly since mid-2025, in episodes that at their peak knocked out 140,000-150,000 barrels per day of Kurdish crude production. Analysts at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy have documented that in at least ten of these prior cases, the weapons recovered were Iranian-supplied Shahed-101 drones — the signature munition of record used by Iran-backed Iraqi militias in hundreds of attacks since 2023 — even as those same militias, including Kataib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq, publicly denied involvement.
What makes this pattern more than a technical detail is who those militias formally answer to. The groups most consistently implicated — organized under the umbrella of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) — are not a foreign army operating in the shadows. They are, on paper, integrated into Iraq's official security apparatus and funded through the Iraqi state budget. A senior Kurdish official told AFP bluntly, regarding the oilfield strikes: "We hold the Iraqi government responsible. It funds the PMF, which in turn is targeting our oil infrastructure." Iraq's own National Security Adviser, Qassem al-Araji, said in a joint appearance with Kurdistan's Interior Minister Rebar Ahmed that Baghdad was "close to identifying" those responsible — a formulation that, months into the pattern, itself concedes the state does not fully control forces nominally under its own command.
This is the structural story the daily wire copy is missing: Baghdad is not merely a bystander failing to prevent Iranian strikes on its territory. In a significant share of these incidents, the alleged perpetrators are entities the Iraqi state itself arms, funds and is constitutionally responsible for, striking Iraqi territory against an Iraqi constituent region — and the federal government has neither named them nor moved to stop them, even as it verbally warns them.
Why the attribution vacuum matters more than any single strike
Iraq's Supreme Judicial Council chief, Faiq Zidan, warned as early as March that armed factions effectively deciding matters of war and peace on their own initiative constitute a threat to state sovereignty itself. The Atlantic Council's Middle East program has gone further, arguing that Baghdad's repeated invocation of "sovereignty" to block direct US or Kurdish air-defense cooperation is hollow precisely because sovereignty requires the capacity to protect one's own territory — a capacity Baghdad has demonstrably not exercised on behalf of the Kurdistan Region, whether the threat originates from Tehran directly or from militias inside Iraq's own security structure.
The consequence is a form of plausible deniability that serves Iranian interests without requiring Iran's direct fingerprints. If an attack on Kurdish oil infrastructure or an Iranian-Kurdish exile camp can be attributed to "unclaimed drones," Tehran gains the coercive effect — degrading Kurdistan's independent oil revenue, punishing its Western energy partnerships, intimidating dissident groups on its border — while Baghdad absorbs the diplomatic cost of failing to secure its own territory, and no one absorbs formal responsibility under international law. Qatar's interior ministry called the wave of strikes on Iraqi Kurdistan "a blatant violation" of Iraqi sovereignty; but sovereignty violated by an unnamed actor, using proxies embedded inside the victim state's own security forces, is a violation with no clear address to send the bill to.
This is also, not incidentally, a slow economic war. The Kurdistan Region depends on independent oil exports for the bulk of its budgetary autonomy from Baghdad — autonomy Iraqi federal authorities have separately squeezed for years by withholding salary transfers in budget disputes. Analysts tracking the drone campaign against Kurdish energy infrastructure describe its throughline as an attempt to erode the financial basis of Kurdish self-rule itself, not merely to inflict tactical damage — deploying economic attrition as a second front alongside the missiles aimed at exiled opposition camps.
The dimension almost no one is asking about
What has received almost no international attention is the specific timing pattern Shafaq News flagged: successive drone swarms over Erbil arriving within hours of Prime Minister al-Zaidi's diplomatic outreach to Washington. If that timing is more than coincidence, it would suggest the attacks function not only as anti-Kurdish or anti-dissident operations but as a signal aimed at Baghdad itself — a demonstration, mid-realignment, that Iran-aligned actors retain the ability to generate a security crisis on Iraqi soil at will, regardless of what the federal government negotiates in Washington. That reading has not been confirmed by any official source, but the fact that it can be plausibly raised at all, four and a half months into the war, is itself an indictment of how little clarity exists around who controls violence on Kurdish territory — and on whose behalf.
For a region that formally declared neutrality in the wider US-Iran war, Iraqi Kurdistan has become something more precarious than a battlefield: a space where responsibility for violence has been made permanently ambiguous, absorbing the costs of a war it says it isn't fighting, at the hands of actors nobody in Baghdad, Erbil or Washington will yet name.
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